When & Where to Slow Down Your Sales Process to Close Deals Faster?

Frictionless selling is about making the sales process more convenient for both buyer and seller alike. It’s about higher prospect conversion rates, more efficient sales teams and happier customers. In the sales world, ‘force’ is anything which drives sales (a great product or service, proactive sales teams, informative content, etc.), while ‘friction’ is anything which slows them down (a clunky buying process, ineffective marketing, poor aftercare, or selling to the wrong prospects). Frictionless selling adds value to your company by increasing positive force while decreasing negative friction. It's about empowering your sales team to better meet the needs of your customers to ultimately grow your business faster.

The 3 stages of frictionless selling:

1. Enable your sales team to spend more time selling.
2. Align your selling process with your customers' buying journey to improve service.
3. Transform your sales figures through a culture of learning.

1) Enablement is about answering two questions: How do your salespeople spend their time? & How effective are the tools they use?

Most sales teams don’t spend enough time selling to prospects. Too often, their days are clogged with a variety of other tasks such as general admin and internal meetings. And while these tasks are important to the smooth running of your business, they aren't always the best use of your sales team's time. Equally, sales teams often don’t have the best tools at their disposal to sell your product or service.

The enablement phase of frictionless selling focusses on empowering your sales team to spend more time selling and less time administrating by streamlining their day and improving the efficiency of the tools they use.

2) Alignment is about making sure your selling process matches your customers' buying journey. Companies often sell their product or service in a way that suits them, not their customer. And with contemporary buying habits changing, the old method of converting prospects via the ‘hard sell’ is already outmoded: the twenty-first-century customer wants to be ‘educated, supported and guided’ not ‘prospected, explored and converted’.

Are your sales team currently available at a time when customers need more information? Are your reps speaking with your prospects on their terms, in their language through their preferred channels? Does your payment process suit your customer? Is your pricing structure transparent? Do you have an unattractive ‘lock-in’ period? Are you adding value to your prospect at every stage of their buying journey? If the answer is no to some or all these questions, then you may need to rethink how you're selling your product or service.

The alignment phase of frictionless selling is about how to adapt your selling process with your prospects' buying journey so you grow your company faster while keeping your customers happy.

3) Transforming your sales teams through a culture of learning is key to growing a modern business. Are your sales teams being coached effectively? Are you identifying important gaps in their skill sets, empowering self growth, putting training plans in place, and tracking progress through reliable reporting? If not, you’re limiting their ability to grow your business.

The G.R.O.W. coaching process is designed to address all these issues. It’s a system that will ensure your business moves with the needs of your customers, attracts more of the right prospects, and converts more leads.

Serve Buyers by Reducing Friction and Adding Value

Frictionless selling is part of the equation. There must be an equal balance between the ease of the buyer’s journey and the value gained from it.

This can happen only when we realign our motivation to “Seek to Serve, Not to Sell.”

For a buyer:

• Selling means product-pushing. Seeking to serve means securing a solution to a problem.
• Selling translates to an exchange of products and services for money. Seeking to serve translates to relevant and meaningful (aka valuable) interactions.
• Selling lands deals. Seeking to serve builds long-term relationships and indefinite moments for both parties to create more value.

The truth is, we should not be focused on removing the friction from the selling but, in true Seek to Serve fashion, to remove the friction for the buyer.

If we as sellers have buyers’ best interests in mind and combine that with relevant and insightful knowledge about their industry and pains, we can make it as easy as possible for a buyer to realize the best solution to their pain.